'Slaughter City' brings social conscience to the stage with meatpacking tale

Apr. 10, 2014

Written by

Aly Brown

Iowa City Press-Citizen

If you go• When: 8 p.m. today through April 19, 2 p.m. Sunday and April 20. • Where: David Thayer Theatre, University of Iowa Theatre Arts Building, 200 N. Riverside Drive. • Tickets: $17 nonstudents, $12 seniors, $10 college students and youth, $5 UI students with valid ID. For tickets and more information, go to http://hancher.uiowa.edu.

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The University of Iowa Theatre Arts Mainstage’s production of Naomi Wallace’s “Slaughter City” finds theater in an unlikely place: a meatpacking plant.

“Slaughter City” is a dark comedy merged with drama following the deteriorating working conditions for slaughterhouse employees and their connection with a secretive stranger, Cod.

Meredith Alexander, a UI lecturer in acting and directing, said she has wanted to direct “Slaughter City” for more than a decade, after encountering Wallace’s work while she was a student in the theater arts program.

“First, as somebody who started my life as an English major loving language and poetry and beautiful, powerful imagistic writing, I was always struck by her writing,” Alexander said. “Even in prose form there’s a very poetic style to her language that I love. Her work not only has the power of incredible imagery and poetry, but it also engages profound ideas about the ways we live, who we are, what matters to us and what makes life worth living.”

Wallace is known for incorporating history and social issues set in everyday scenarios in her plays, including “One Flea Spare,” which follows strangers quarantined together in plague-ridden 17th century London.

Alexander said that when she directs, she is “looking for the questions, not the answers.”

“When I’m attracted to a piece, I usually want to do it because I have no idea how to do it,” she said. “I’m terrified and very excited to find out what’s embedded in it. I want to unpack the pieces and discover all the complex questions and layers that emerge.”

“Slaughter City” is definitely complex — weaving themes of gender identity, class, human and labor rights, race and sexuality into the violent world of a slaughterhouse.

Scenic designer and associate professor Eric Stone said he collaborated closely with Alexander to create a fluid, permeable space that erases boundaries between the audience and action. Stone said one of his greatest challenges in designing the set was allowing actors to access all sides and to differentiate segments to show actors moving through multiple worlds simultaneously.

“It is a show that has a lot of challenges, so the aesthetics overriding this is a world that is layer and worn and perforated, permeable as it were,” Stone said. “There are characters in scene and characters on stage but in different worlds. It needed a sense of fluidity and permutation.”

Stone said “Slaughter City” takes place in a meatpacking plant with a long history, in a nonspecific location and time. Without going into detail, Stone said the props and set evolve over the course of the show, as the lines between meat and humans are blurred.

“It may seem sensational, but the meat is trying to be the catalyst for the change in dynamics and change in personalities, when it’s really about the human interactions,” he said. “On the surface, it’s about people cutting up meat, but really it’s about people treating each other like people, rather than treating each other like meat.”

“Slaughter City” is presented as part of the Series on Arts and Rights at the university. Dramaturg Sarah Johnson said the Performing Arts division is always committed to promoting human rights, and this is the first attempt at a yearlong mission.

Other SOAR events included a concert from the School of Music on Human Rights Day and themed dances through February from the Department of Dance.

Sunday’s matinee performance will be followed by a panel discussion about the themes, history and ideas presented in the show, featuring Jennifer Sherer, director of the UI Labor Center, and other educators.

Johnson said “Slaughter City” fit in with SOAR for a number of reasons, including as an opportunity to showcase “timely work by one of our most distinguished graduates.”

“As a part of the SOAR initiative, it tackles big questions about human rights in industry,” she said. “ ‘Slaughter City’ investigates labor history, the current state of the meatpacking industry as well as gender and race in the workplace. ‘Slaughter City’ explores human’s rights issues through performance, which is the mission of SOAR.”